What if there weren't hit points?

[Headfirst]

What if, instead of slowly chipping away at enemies' hit points, you had to succeed at one or more maneuvers or apply certain status effects to defeat monsters? Maybe a goblin only requires one success. Disarm or trip a goblin and he's out. An ogre might require several effects, and a dragon would require quite a few.

Now we change some other stuff, mainly spells. Instead of doing XdX damage, a spell might apply the "ignite" effect, while a cold spell would "chill" or whatever. Keep stuff like shaken, panicked, sickened, etc, to round out the system.

Each round, you (or a monster) can try to end effects on you. If you got tripped, you get back up. Ignited? Put yourself out. Staggered? Attempt another Will save. Whatever.

Thoughts?

[Mortuum]

Sounds more colourful, but there are several problems with it that would need to be overcome.

Stacking debuffs instead of damage results in a slippery slope effect, since foes that are closer to defeat are weaker. This makes initiative even more important than it already is, turns a little good or bad luck into a very serious knock-on effect and reduces drama by creating foregone conclusions.

Fights would get gradually longer as the participants got more powerful. A 20th level character could succeed in debuffing a minotaur every time, but if it needs to be done four times, it will likely as not take 4 turns. With hit points, characters can deal out more damaging as they level, so they can take out lesser foes more quickly as well as more reliably.

Suggesting that every damaging spell be changed is almost like suggesting every feat be re-designed. It simply cannot be done. You'd probably need the system to be almost exactly equivalent to damage dice in order to be able to rule what a spell does without homebrewing it on the spot, maintain meaningful differences between spells and maintain game balance.

If trying to end effects on yourself is free or as good a use of your time as trying to affect your foes, you risk endless battles, where the average round does not bring the fight closer to its resolution. If it's less efficient, as healing magic is, it's likely not going to be a good option, since giving up your action to stay in the fight is a much worse option in a slippery slope scenario. It could be useful in some situations though, like when you've been hit by an effect that penalises attacks, but not attempts to cure it.

[Mike J]

A more workable solution might be something along the lines of what Star Wars SAGA edition did. They made a single condition track with 6 levels that ranged from "normal" to unconscious/disabled. Each time something applied a condition, you drop one level on the track. At each level you suffer more negative effects; often another -1 or -2 to attacks, saves, etc.

They also made a damage threshold (some amount of hit points based primarily on Con, HD, and size). Each time an attack beat a creature's threshold, it dropped one level on the condition track. So, between applying conditions and attacks that exceed threshold, you could disable a foe without chewing through all their hit points.

A creature could improve its condition, with 3 swift actions. SAGA allowed spending greater actions for lesser ones, so you could take 3 swift actions in one turn and do nothing else. 8 hours of rest removed most conditions. Naturally, some effects applied more than one drop on the condition track and were not easily removed.

Something like this wouldn't be that hard to implement and wouldn't introduce that many problems. Food for thought.

[SanKeshun]

I think it has some level of promise.

Think of it this way: a monster has a number of hit points equal to its CR. Whenever you succeed on a combat maneuver, attack, or successfully affect it with a damaging spell, it loses one hit point. To keep the idea of the OP, a debuff can count towards this.

Basically, it's not "how long until the thing's dead," but rather, "how long until the thing can't kill me back."

At high levels, with iterative attacks and a whole slew of feats, you can start doing multiple points per round (spellcasters can't, but make up for it with more powerful debuffs). If you split up the points dealt from damage and combat maneuvers, then feats like Awesome Blow or Improved Shield Bash also become more useful, but without having to rewrite them at all.

I think it could be quite interesting.

[Headfirst]

Good points, everyone. The more that I think about it, the more I like it. Actually, spells might not be as hard to alter as we think... it's really just the damage that gets switched over. Range, number of targets, casting time, and all that stay the same. Now, instead of doing d6 per level damage, a fireball just causes the ignite effect to everything it hits.

I had totally overlooked how iterative attacks help balance the system out at higher levels, too. So a minotaur requires 4 effects to take down? Well, a mid-level fighter or monk could do that in one round with a little luck.

The fun (and vivid) part is that not all effects stack. You can't just disarm that minotaur four times. It has to have four effects active on it at the same time... so if the wizard sets him on fire, then you disarm him, but next round he picks his axe back up, he's back down to one effect.

So what happens when you get the minotaur to 4 effects? Well, he could either just go down and be out of the fight, or he could become helpless. Now you can coup de grace him.

That sounds much more cinematic to me. What sounds better to you?

"We spent two rounds hitting that minotaur until we got him to 0 hit points."

or...

"Our rogue did a dirty trick to blind the minotaur, then our warrior disarmed and tripped him. Then, after the monk hit him with stunning fist, the barbarian coup de grace'd him with his battleaxe, taking his head right off!"

[Orfamay Quest]

One issue is that you lose granularity of damage. If the monster loses one hit point every time it's hit, then it doesn't matter whether I threw a marshmallow at it, or crushed it under a 10,000 kilo weight.

It also overpowers a lot of the maneuvers in that they apply status conditions and count towards hit point attrition, so it makes throwing sand in someone's face a better tactic than stabbing them with a sword.

[Mortuum]

(I'm assuming that this system will allow anybody to trade what would have been a damaging hit for some kind of appropriate condition, so if a lion bites you you get dragged to the ground or it tears your shield off your arm or something. Otherwise too many creatures and characters end up unable to fight, due to lacking the required CMB/feats/qualities. Cirrect me if I've misunderstood)

Iterative attacks will not balance this.

One of the hurdles with this system is the way it makes a prick from a dart as powerful as a massive chop from an axe, at least in some respects. Sure, the axe might give you a worse condition, but the dart will still take you out of the fight just as easily.

I can make a 3rd level ragebred skinwalker barbarian who gets 6 attacks. Under the system as you describe it, that's more potential killing power than a hasted 20th level fighter with a greatsword. Sure, it's inaccurate, but it's still plainly unbalanced against 3rd level characters who aren't built to maximise attacks-per-round.

There's also the problem of durability scaling much faster than attack rate. A 20th level fighter probably attacks 5 times as fast as a 1st level fighter, but he's 20 times tougher. You go from everything being a 1-hit KO at first level to each hit chipping off a mere 20% at 20th level.

[Headfirst]

Hmm, what if we went through all the weapons and swapped out their relative damage values for roughly equivalent benefits to certain maneuvers? So a dart is just a dart, but a greataxe grants a +4 bonus one or two maneuvers.

Orfamay, in a system like this, there wouldn't be an action for "stab it with a sword." There is no raw damage for weapons (or spells, etc). You don't beat an orc by doing X damage to it; you beat it by tripping it and doing a coup de grace. Or disarming it and demoralizing it into running away. Or sundering its armor and then tying it up in a grapple. It doesn't matter, as long as you give it two effects.

[Nohwear]

I would look at Mutants and Masterminds. It uses a system that does what you want.

Here is the SRD.

[SanKeshun]

Mortuum, you make some excellent points, and I'm going to try to counter them each in turn.

Firstly, the problem that Orfamay also pointed out - by equalizing damage, greataxes become equal to sharp rocks. My suggestion here is different tiers of effects. A sharp rock might inflict (for want of a better name) Slashing Damage 1, while a greataxe might inflict Slashing Damage 3.
Then, monsters also have a bottommost effective tier - a red dragon would still suffer the effects of Slashing Damage 1, but since that's only a tier 1 effect, Slashing Damage 1 doesn't contribute to taking the dragon out of the fight.
Problem with this system: bookkeeping. It's relatively straightforward once you have little boxes and lines to keep your notes on this organized, but you're doing that for every fight, which is too much. I don't have a solution for this yet.

Secondly, the durability problem. This ties into my tier suggestion: a creature can have more "maneuver points," but it also can have a higher bottommost effective tier. The BET corresponds loosely to damage reduction, so oozes probably have a low BET but a high MP. Thus, a Black Pudding (CR 7) might have 7 MP and 0 BET, while a Dracolisk (also CR 7) might have 4 MP but 1 BET.

Another thing that tiers solves: the value of attack spells. Fireball might inflict Ignite 1 (again, I'm numbering things for simplicity. Better names are needed). But Burning Hands would also inflict Ignite 1. So what if a Fireball inflicted Ignite 1, or on targets already suffering Ignite 1, inflicts Ignite 2? Now casting multiple spells has more value, and being able to cast higher level spells is important, since it lets you overcome an opponent's BET.

[Whack-a-Rogue]

I'd recommend looking into the Dungeon World system. It still uses HP, but the gameplay style is so narrative, that it's easy to account for the "sharp rock vs greataxe" problem.

[Headfirst]

I think a great way of avoiding two big problems (1. disparity in weapon/spell damage and 2. number of effects required to defeat high-level monsters) could be addressed by the DCs required to make those effects.

Throwing a dart at a dragon is probably not going to make you win a dirty trick maneuver, but using a super magical dart of blinding +5 would give you enough of a bonus on the roll to pull it off. By gating high-level monsters behind high DCs (or CMB), you kill those two birds with one stone.

[Mortuum]

SanKeshun, I'm afraid I don't think your tiers would work well. I get what you're going for, but as far as I can see, their actual effect in play would be to keep darts just as damaging as axes, until an invisible limit is crossed and they become almost worthless. The imbalance remains, but against a certain threat level, darts go from too strong to not strong enough.

Your solution to the durability problem doesn't seem to help. It still allows for creatures that take 5 a very long time to kill, but it introduces the alternative of creatures that are more delicate, but completely hose builds that make lots of small hits by effectively ignoring their damage, meaning that no matter how many little debuffs they stack on their foes, they can never win without a big-hitting ally on their side.

Headfirst, a DC-based system could work. Basically it'd be a "save against damage". The only problems are making it scale nicely and figuring out how many failed saves should bring a creature down. If it's a fixed number, the ability to consistently hit that many times will become the focus of combat strategy (which may or may not be a bad thing), and people always going down after X number of hits will become very obvious, damaging immersion. If it scales with CR, fights will gradually become too long as described above. If it's variable depending on check results, this whole system becomes hit points with wound penalties, only far more complicated. It could work, but only if done carefully.

[Greylurker]

The 3rd edition of Exalted has created a neat system for combat.

Under their system most of your attacks are about Gaining Initiative and taking it from your opponent. Initiative repisents how much of an advantage you have over your opponent. Once you think you have enough of it you go for a "decicive attack" which converts you current initiative score into a Damage value. Course if you miss it, your initiative drops like a rock and you are in trouble.

Descriptively the system leads to a lot of back and forth parrying, feints and light blows until you have your enemy on the ropes and then go for that Big Kill shot.

[Vatras]

There have been attempts at doing combat like that, even in other game systems. They did not catch on because they are unwieldy and unbalanced.
There are hybrid systems too, mxing hitpoints and special effects, most notably Rolemaster, which require typically way more bookkeeping or tables to check.
The damage via hitpoints has worked best so far.

[thejeff]

Vatras wrote:

There have been attempts at doing combat like that, even in other game systems. They did not catch on because they are unwieldy and unbalanced.

There are hybrid systems too, mxing hitpoints and special effects, most notably Rolemaster, which require typically way more bookkeeping or tables to check.
The damage via hitpoints has worked best so far.

There have been attempts to do combat like that in other game systems, which didn't catch on because they weren't D&D.

For values of "didn't catch on" which correspond to "didn't manage to replace D&D as the dominant RPG".

Now grafting such a system onto a otherwise normal D&D system rather than designing a system from the ground up to work that way is a bit more of a trick.

[SanKeshun]

Mortuum, you're neglecting that effects stack. Make someone shaken twice and they become frightened, a higher-tier effect. That was how I imagined the durability problem being equalized (though I admit I still have no good response to the first, still working on that).

[Headfirst]

I wonder if this system even needs AC anymore... or CMB/CMD for that matter. What if every possible maneuver or spell simply targeted the appropriate saving throw (we'll just call them "defenses" now).

Trip goes against Reflex, sunder against Fortitude, dirty trick against Will, etc, etc, etc. I think that would keep this system fluid and interesting wile simultaneously reducing the complexity.

Thoughts?

[Mortuum]

Many effects do not stack, and depending on the method you use to inflict them, even some normally stacking effects won't do it. There's no way to stack disarming, tripping, stunning etc.

You could possibly make it work by creating a page of tables that organise existing effects into progressions, but that's a whole other idea, hence my concerns.

[Firstbourne]

I never liked the idea of operating at 100% capacity and then suddenly dropping dead. It never made sense.

I grew up playing Rolemaster (criticals, damage and conditions, etc.)
but to keep things simplified I use the following:

Once a being has lost 50% of its available HP it receives a -1 to hit, AC, saves, and skills.

Once a being has lost 75% of its available HP it receives a -3 to hit, AC, saves, and skills.

The penalties are similar to Fatigued or Exhausted conditions, but can be removed with healing.

[Headfirst]

Mortuum wrote:

Many effects do not stack, and depending on the method you use to inflict them, even some normally stacking effects won't do it. There's no way to stack disarming, tripping, stunning etc.

You could possibly make it work by creating a page of tables that organise existing effects into progressions, but that's a whole other idea, hence my concerns.

Well, you really wouldn't need to stack some effects for this system. Effects that do stack would simply not replace one another. For example, if you had an ability to gave a creature the shaken condition, then, if they already were shaken, caused them to be panicked, this system would keep the shaken condition in place instead of upgrading it so that, as a result, the creature had two status effects counting toward defeating it.

This is actually kind of cool because it makes stacked conditions more difficult to get rid of. There are a few ways to get rid of being shaken, but not many that can alleviate being panicked, hence stacking conditions becomes very effective.

[Headfirst]

Firstbourne wrote:

I never liked the idea of operating at 100% capacity and then suddenly dropping dead. It never made sense.

Neither did I. It makes combat feel cold and mathematical instead of visceral and dynamic.

Firstbourne wrote:

Once a being has lost 50% of its available HP it receives a -1 to hit, AC, saves, and skills.

Once a being has lost 75% of its available HP it receives a -3 to hit, AC, saves, and skills.

The problem with these is they don't scale very well. A 1st level fighter under 75% hit points suffering a -3 penalty is disastrous. However, -3 doesn't mean very much to a 20th level fighter.

Also, taking a penalty to hit, AC, saves, and skills disproportionately hinders marital classes over casters. So my wizard is at -3 on everything? Whatever. None of those things affect my ability to conjure creatures, toss fireballs, or cast protective spells.

Firstbourne wrote:

The penalties are similar to Fatigued or Exhausted conditions, but can be removed with healing.

Hmm, why not just use fatigued and exhausted for your penalties instead of flat numerical modifiers? Those conditions at least scale a little bit (no running or charging) yet still favor casters over martials.

If you really wanted a good system, you'd be better off designing new status effects that are specifically made to scale with level.

[thejeff]

Those kinds of penalties, if sufficient to be important, also lead to death spirals - getting the first strikes in to weaken the enemy becomes even more important. Rocket tag escalation.

Even beyond that, it doesn't really match either genre expectations or real injuries. The genre has a lot of rallying after injuries to stop the baddie at the last moment - made much harder by this kind of thing. And real injuries, in that kind of high adrenaline situation tend to be either unnoticed until afterwards or immediately crippling, with very little in between. Unless you're losing a lot of blood or have some body part incapacitated, cuts and blows will mostly be a problem later. Five minutes from now, with the adrenaline gone and the leg swelling up, I'm not going to be able to walk - right now, the blood from the blow to my leg is barely a distraction.

It also depends what you think hit points are. And exactly how a mid level fighter can take as much punishment as a rhino. I prefer to think of most of hit points as the ability to avoid damage - you're not actually getting chopped up with each blow, but avoiding the worst of them, at the cost of slowing down a little, getting closer to leaving yourself open for the real blow that ends the fight.

[Kazaan]

If you're going to try to increase verisimilitude like that, taking it from "make an arbitrary number decrease to zero" to "apply an arbitrary number of debuffs", you really aren't changing anything. If you're trying to aim for what I think you're aiming for, you need "soft HP". Instead of a set number that, once you reach it, you're dead or defeated, you roll a dice to determine if you have succumbed to your injuries. The more injury you take, the higher the DC gets. This way, you aren't just whittling them down to a set value but, rather, any combatant has the chance to tough it out based on their roll or, conversely, a particularly tough opponent might get hit JUST right. And it isn't just as simple as adjusting hit points; you're going to need to introduce various rules elements that will make the DC to stay up and in the fight higher or lower, modify the roll in various ways, etc. The best way to do this is not to retrofit it to an existing system but, rather, to build a new one from the ground up.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." -John Muir

[Headfirst]

Kazaan wrote:

The best way to do this is not to retrofit it to an existing system but, rather, to build a new one from the ground up.

Challenge accepted. :)

[Mortuum]

Headfirst, my mention of conditions that don't stack was in reference to SanKeshun's damage tiers suggestion. His idea does need them to stack.

Good luck with your new project.